Thursday, June 15, 2017

One of the charming aspects of living in Manhattan, especially near Central Park is the free live entertainment.

I was walking home through the park tonight after my last French class for level Advanced Beginner 201 when I had the distinct impression I was hearing Elvis Costello singing.

And sure enough it was him doing a show in the middle of the park, and as I was passing by he sang one of my absolutely most favorite songs by him, "Everyday I Write the Book." The song is great in itself but it also has meaning for me because at the time I first heard the song I was switching over from concentrating my artistic endeavors in graphic arts to literary arts and also I was in love with this guy, whom I worked with at the time.

Enjoy.

Don't tell me you don't know what love is
When you're old enough to know better
When you find strange hands in your sweater
When your dreamboat turns out to be a footnote
I'm a man with a mission in two or three editions

[Chorus:]
And I'm giving you a longing look
Everyday, everyday, everyday I write the book

Chapter One we didn't really get along
Chapter Two I think I fell in love with you
You said you'd stand by me in the middle of Chapter Three
But you were up to your old tricks in Chapters Four, Five and Six

[chorus]

The way you walk
The way you talk, and try to kiss me, and laugh
In four or five paragraphs
All your compliments and your cutting remarks
Are captured here in my quotation marks

[chorus]

Don't tell me you don't know the difference
Between a lover and a fighter
With my pen and my electric typewriter
Even in a perfect world where everyone was equal
I'd still own the film rights and be working on the sequel

My anti-racist bona fides

Although I was smeared on Tumblr by infamous bully Mikki Kendall and identitarian extremist K. Tempest Bradford (and thanks to the cozy relationship between Tumblr and Google, the smears show up in my search results), in fact I have a long history of opposing racism, and the evidence for the past 10 years is on this blog. Unhinged extremists like Kendall and Bradford don't care to know anything about the strangers they randomly smear. That's why they and the people who promote them like Verso books are horrible and don't help solve the problem of racism in the United States.